The first dead body I ever saw belonged to Mrs Maynard.
Belonged?
That sounds stupid.
The truth of the matter is that when I saw it, the body that is, it didn’t belong to anyone. Not me. Not you and certainly not to Mrs Maynard who had no further use for it.
No, if it belonged to anyone then it had to be to the tall, thin, miserable looking man in the black suit. The man who had come to take her away.
All these thoughts and more swam through my head as I gazed down on the deceased old lady in the bed, who, to be quite honest I didn’t recognise until I heard someone mention her name.
I was a kid.
I was puzzled, confused and more than a little frightened. And as my mother squirmed at the tightness with which I squeezed her hand, wondered what I was doing here.
Why had my mother brought me to this dark place?
To look at a dead person?
If so, why?
Was this another one of those weird grown-up things?
Was this something about the necessity of facing up to the truth about life…and er…death?
Maybe something to do with the health-giving qualities of not hiding behind statements like, ‘Mrs Maynard’s gone to sleep’.
Or was this about inflicting enough trauma (re the facts of life), upon your innocent child to make him wet himself?
Mother had form in this department.
This was how me and spinach were introduced. Shock treatment. Green and horrible it suddenly appeared on my plate.
Seems to have done the trick. I haven’t touched it since.
Anyway, when I finally realised who the stiff was, I calmed down. I wasn’t frightened anymore, just surprised as to how different she looked in death.
Younger for one thing.
Her face had taken on a smoothness that belied her one hundred and fifty years.
Ok, so I now know that she wasn’t and couldn’t have been one hundred and fifty years old but at the time I was a dumb kid, and kids, dumb or otherwise, live in a world of their own making.
They use their imagination. They fantasise. They exaggerate. They paint the world from a pallet of their own choosing. In short, they tell huge lies.
And that was us. Me, Fat Freddy, Smells Warburton and Four Eyes Phillips.
Me and the guys had decided some time ago that Mrs Maynard was the oldest person in the world.
By our calculations she was somewhere in the region of one hundred and fifty years old.
Let me explain.
Seems ridiculous now, but once we spent a whole afternoon peering through her windows and following her on the street. All in an attempt to count the wrinkles on her face.
This was all down to Fat Freddy who told us in all sincerity that, that was how you determined someone’s age. It did not just apply to trees.
When Smells Warburton lied through his teeth and told us he had counted one hundred and fifty folds of skin, that was it, decision made.
Mrs Maynard was one hundred and fifty years old.
Whatever her real age, we couldn’t have been far wrong because here she was, dead.
And as I related my experience to the boys that evening, we agreed, only very old people die.
It’s a terrible admission to make but there was no sadness in us.
If I remember correctly, a short discussion ensued on whether or not there was life after death but that was all. No pity. No regret. No nothing.
The only other thing I remember about the discussion was Smells insisting that heaven was full of large naked ladies and fat flying babies.
Oh yes, and Four Eyes Phillips declaring with the kind of certainty that I now associate with Christian fundamentalists, that when he arrived in heaven, he wouldn’t have to wear the thick ‘milk-bottle’ lenses that we’d all become familiar with.
One thing in our favour that does needs saying…although we weren’t sorry at her passing we did not rejoice…
well…not totally.
Look. We were kids
We were a million miles away.
And to be totally honest, and in the pursuit of truth, there was a reason why Fat Freddie, Smells Warburton, Four Eyes Phillips and me, were, not totally consumed with grief.
I’ll tell you for why.
What me and the guys were experiencing regarding the passing of Mrs Maynard, is best described as, relief.
You see and believe me when I say I mean no disrespect, Mrs Maynard played a large part in our lives that was now, with her demise, thankfully, gone for ever.
See, what Mrs Maynard did, or to be more precise, used to do that affected our young lives so very much, was…and you may laugh…was…knitting.
This was how it worked.
In those days’ times were hard.
Luxuries, and that includes food and heat, were thin on the ground.
Day to day living was hand to mouth. No-one had any money and if you were lucky enough to find yourself unexpectedly at the correct end of an inheritance, legal or otherwise, you upped sticks and got the hell out of there. The lucky ones left before their dust did and who could blame them?
For us poor bastards that were left behind the struggle continued. The name of the game was survival, and the rules worked, as best as they could, on the ‘something for nothing’ basis.
This, I must make clear, did not include stealing, (mostly). At least not from your own.
If you stole from your neighbour then you were dead meat, no question.
What we did was help each other out.
True. We used our brains and looked to our own for answers to all those questions on the all-important subject of, ‘getting by’.
Recycling for example. (Please note: Recycling is not a new concept). Recycling was a skilful necessity in our neighbourhood, a long time before you rich folks began separating your green and brown wine bottles.
For our poverty-stricken neighbourhood, much was made of discovering and exploiting the human resources and skills that existed within our own community.
If someone had a particular insight into anything that would benefit the neighbourhood, then it was harnessed immediately and used positively for the good of all.
In Mrs Maynard’s case it happened to be knitting.
Which she did, all the time, day in-day out.
Every hour that God sent Mrs Maynard knitted. From the early hours of the morning ‘till late at night, weekends included.
She was knitting when she gave birth to her two sets of twins and she knitted graveside when her husband (Mr Maynard), was laid to rest.
She knitted subconsciously.
She knitted in her sleep, and when nature called, she kept on knitting.
When she walked, she knitted. When she talked, she knitted.
She was even found needles in hand (so they say), when the Grim Reaper made his personal call.
(I have a theory that he only turned up to order a pullover).
Her constant clitter-clatter only ceased when she was utilising her other skill, unravelling.
If there was an Olympic section, Mrs Maynard could have knitted and unravelled for her country.
History has it that when Mrs Maynard’s skills with the needles first came to the attention of the community, family members desperate for warm clothes for their long-suffering children, emerged from the darkest depths of the neighbourhood laden down with sacks of worn out clothing to be unravelled and resurrected.
People, (who if they really loved their kids should have known better), would arrive on her doorstep, pay her the agreed fee and within one calendar month Mrs Maynard would come up with the goods, (usually a pullover. In my case, always a pullover).
In this way it wasn’t long before Mrs Maynard became the stuff of legend and, I hate to admit, a curse on every child’s lips.
You see, us kids, unlike our parents, hated and despised Mrs Maynard’s woollen concoctions.
To put it bluntly, (this was how we kids saw it), forget the money saved, forget the fact that she kept us warm in winter. The point was, (and try telling this to your ma and pa), the point was, Mrs Maynard’s woollen wear made us look stupid. In our neighbourhood, it was a recognised phenomenon that kids who wore the House of Maynard never smiled again.
Unfortunately, me and my friends those who were ‘dressed’ almost exclusively by Mrs Maynard, never wore it well.
We carried the mark of Maynard with shame and disgust.
The pullovers were grey and the wool stiff from overuse and distant genetic memories of having been a sock in a previous life. And that was not all…
Mrs Maynard smoked. And I mean smoked. We’re talking heavyweight inhalation here.
We’re talking near a hundred cigarettes (if she was on form), a day.
While her knurled, nicotine-stained fingers gripped her tools tightly and clicked mercilessly away, a long unfiltered King-size dangled dangerously from her lip, sending a thin stream of blue smoke upward, to filter through and stain her hair yellow for ever.
Now, I’ve been a smoker.
And although I quit some years ago I consider myself lucky enough not to have fallen into the trap of becoming holier-than-thou. If people want to smoke that’s fine by me. And to be quite honest when I see others pulling on the weed, I still feel a distant pang in my chest and a sense of missing out.
What I’m saying is this, I have no problem with those who smoke. Invent me a safe cigarette, reduce the likelihood of me rotting from the inside out and I’ll suck on it with the rest of them. However, I would have to draw the line at Mrs Maynard. She was a definite no-go area.
OK, I’m gonna pause here and suggest that if you are eating finish up quick before moving on.
You finished? Good.
I will resume.
When Mrs Maynard smoked, she coughed.
And when Mrs Maynard coughed, she would empty the contents of her bubbling lungs over mine and my friends’ embryonic pullovers.
This meant, and not wishing to go into too much detail, this meant, er…stuff…mingling with the forming fibres.
The thing is, you never knew what it was you were pulling over your head.
The anguished cry that would echo around the neighbourhood usually about Christmas time was , ‘Mrs Maynard’s pullovers stink’. A statement based not on the particular style of garment, but a literal fact.
When the finished article arrived from Mrs Maynard’s house it was seventy-five percent nicotine. Ten percent an unidentifiable gluttonous substance and fifteen percent recycled wool.
To put it on was akin to dipping your face into a janitor’s bucket full of week old cigarette butts.
It was horrible and vile both at the same time.
It made you feel like you had smoked Mrs Maynard’s total tobacco intake.
It left you with a blinding headache, failing eyesight and a nicotine addiction problem that you would come to regret in later life.
I hated those pullovers with a passion.
The knowledge that another one might be under construction gave me and the juvenile population of our small township, regular nightmares.
So…
As I stood hand in hand with my mother looking down on that lifeless corpse, I have to admit I smiled.
Cruel as it may seem, now with Mrs Maynard dead and gone, life could now take on a much more pleasant hue.
So much so, that I almost didn’t mind wearing a Maynard creation for the funeral.
Almost…
End.